Bread and Butter (12 page)

“Harry,” Leo said gently, “it’s not the kind of thing you just try out.”

Britt had known all along that Leo wasn’t likely to change his mind, but he felt the crumpling of hope nevertheless. He and Harry watched Leo gather his jacket.

“I guess you and I need to talk schedules,” Leo said. He sounded very crisp and professional, so Britt simply nodded mutely. He’d expected to feel saddened by Leo’s lack of vision, perhaps, or protective of Harry’s feelings, but he felt abandoned instead. Leo had a way of making even this space, which Britt loved, feel a little dilapidated and ill-conceived.

“You’d better sweep,” he told Harry when Leo was gone. “Or we’ll get mice.”

Harry looked at Britt bleakly. “You sweep.”

A
FEW DAYS AFTER HIS MEETING
with Britt and Leo, Harry invited Camille out to lunch
. T
hey met at a cheap noodle house where a dour Chinese man stood behind the counter, pummeling noodle dough and glaring at the customers. Camille ordered beef bone soup, and the name turned out not to be a euphemism
. W
hen the metal bowl was placed before her, she gazed into it at what appeared to be a cow knuckle and then reached into her purse, fished out a hair clip, and pulled her hair into a ponytail.

“You do find ways to challenge yourself,” Harry said.

“I have to admit I thought there’d be more than bone,” she said. “But I’m in it now.” She sipped at the beef broth and considered it, her face showing such pleasure that Harry reached over and took a spoonful for himself. He had ordered noodles with pork and pickled mustard greens, and Camille took a chunk of pork from his bowl with her chopsticks. They ate quietly for a moment. Harry was tuned for any faint vibration of tension between them, just in case, but it was evident that now they were just pals as far as she was concerned, chomping at each other’s noodle bowls.

“How’s the new partnership going?”

“Okay,” he said. “Leo passed. But Britt’s still in.”

“Does Leo care if you use their bookkeeper, their purveyors? Get a few economies of scale working in your favor?” She opened up a jar of chile sauce and spooned several dollops into her soup.

“I think he’s fine with that,” he said. “Britt brought up the same thing.”

“Did he,” she said. Camille stirred her noodles thoughtfully. The steam rising from the bowl had turned her cheekbones dewy, and her nose was faintly gleaming. “You know, I thought you’d have a hard time prying either of them loose. I mean, family or not, I didn’t think you’d get Britt in with you unless he really believed in you. That’s my impression, anyway.” She gave a little shrug.

Something about the casual way she offered this opinion, with its suggestion that she was aware of Britt, that she had a sea of opinions and considerations of him that she kept private, wormed just under Harry’s skin.

“I guess,” he said. “It’s actually thrown me a little. I’m used to doing it alone.” He slurped a spoonful of spicy broth, thinking that putting it that way hadn’t sounded so bad. More lone wolf than lonely idiot out of his depth.

“You’re definitely going to have to find your way with that,” she said. Harry glanced up, taken aback by the firmness in her voice. “Family’s tough,” she continued. “Have you guys ever worked together before?”

“No. Just him and Leo. We were too far apart in age for it to come up, I suppose.”

“That’s better. Clean slate. But you know—” She lifted the bone between her chopsticks and examined it, finally identifying an infinitesimal morsel of beef, which she nipped off with her front teeth. She made the maneuver look rather neat and elegant; even the angry noodle man looked mollified and hurled his ball of dough to the counter with a modicum of gentleness. “Don’t fall into little-brother mode
. Y
ou’re never going to avoid it altogether, but it’ll be tempting to take his opinions as gospel
. A
nd you’re still the one who’s really on the hook for this place, Harry. So remember that you have a point of view too.”

“Of course,” Harry said. “Have you seen some vein of weakness in me or something?”

“Not at all,” she said. “I’m probably projecting my own family onto you.”

Harry knew little about her family, though enough details—boarding school, a childhood horse—had emerged for him to perceive that she’d come from privilege. He knew that she too had two older siblings, a sister in Philadelphia and a brother in New York, and that her retired parents traveled extensively together, though they had lived apart since Camille was in high school. In a family of pianists, singers, and sculptors, Camille had preferred volleyball to pottery, math camp to theater camp, and she still found greater pleasure in a stack of orderly accounting books than in a painting
. A
s a result she found it difficult to find a conversational topic with her family that lasted longer than fifteen minutes. She regarded families who worked together and were intertwined in one another’s daily lives as exotic and perhaps a little frightening. For this reason she liked to hear about Britt and Leo’s partnership and appeared to be continually intrigued that the Torsini women made pasta side by side each day and chatted all the while. Each time she saw Harry she expressed fresh surprise that renting a room in his parents’ house was going just fine. Sometimes Harry found himself playing up his family’s good side, as if no problems had ever occurred, just to enjoy her pleasure and disbelief
. T
o hear him tell it, Britt and Leo had paid close attention to every one of Harry’s travels and jobs instead of remaining consistently two endeavors behind; his mother had never once locked all three of them out of the house until they cleaned their crap from the yard or stopped annoying the life out of her, whichever came first; and his father had never been heard to utter Toyota-related statements like “The thing about the Japanese is that you just can’t trust them.”

“I’m sure my family is as nuts as yours,” Harry said. “It’s just that no one talks about anything long enough for it to show.”

“Oh, you make it sound like you’re all a bunch of silent farmers or something,” she said. “You and Britt are both talkers! Leo, I can’t tell.”

“When you get Leo going, you can’t shut him up,” Harry admitted. “It’s a question of finding the subject. For instance, he had plenty to say about my menu, which he agrees with you is too diverse.”

“I said it was scattershot. Don’t try to make me sound like a closet racist just because you don’t want to edit yourself.”

Harry laughed
. A
fter a moment he mused, “You know I said the same thing about
their
menu. I don’t know
. W
hat do I know?”

“Just be pleased to have such an experienced partner.” She waved a hand to dismiss the whole topic and took a long sip of her broth.

Harry returned to his soup, thinking that he had worked against his own interests once again: he’d snowed Camille into believing that his family was nothing but hugs and touch football games, and now he couldn’t quite bring himself to explain why he had any doubts at all about this partnership. Any reservations he expressed about Britt would only look like he was trying to stem her interest in him, and any about Leo would look like sour grapes. So he said nothing, just chewed a slightly tough piece of barbecued pork and listened to the sounds of Camille sipping delicately at her broth, the clicking of plastic chopsticks on metal bowls all around them.

BY ELEVEN A.M. HARRY HAD WINNOWED
down the line cook résumés to six, called to schedule interviews, and cleaned and polished the bar. Now and then he paused to test his kitchen equipment yet again. Harry’s recurring fear was that on opening night the range would explode with bursts of gas, the oven would hover fitfully around room temperature, the dishwasher would stay cold and silent.

He sipped his coffee with a rueful smile
. T
he new dishwasher was leased, at Britt’s insistence. Harry hadn’t known that no one ever bought a dishwasher; people leased them cheaply and bought the detergent through the same company. He had been all set to buy his own, used, off Craigslist from an out-of-business diner twenty minutes away, and when Britt found out he all but hurled himself at the phone to make Harry call it off. It was a relief to feel he’d avoided at least one mistake, but even more so to feel that one thing in this restaurant would be someone else’s problem if it failed.

Not so with vendors, to whom Harry had to give a personal guarantee, an unsettling if unavoidable experience. People who dealt with restaurants didn’t really give a shit about your LLC
. T
hey were so used to seeing places go belly-up that they went straight after the proprietor personally rather wasting any time on business niceties. Not that he intended to default on anyone. But he did keep picturing the burly, mustachioed vegetable guy, and the goateed fish purveyor, and the bearded meat guy—it was a facial-hair kind of business, apparently—lined up outside his parents’ door.

Now he got up and circled the perimeter of the space, peering at corners and testing the shelves he’d hung in the server station and the prep areas. He was afraid to stack them with dishes. Britt would be interviewing waitstaff; people would be coming in. It had to be done. He got a couple of heavy sauté pans from the line and stacked them on the shelves above the server station
. T
hen he grabbed a few more, plus a few notebooks and a box of napkins
. T
he shelves held, but Harry felt only a slight relief. Still, the shelves were okay and the dishwasher company had twenty-four-hour repair. It was something.

The space was freezing; he had taken to wearing an extra layer until he worked up a good sweat
. T
here was no way he was raising the thermostat just for scut work. He tried to start out with the most strenuous tasks and hoped that body heat would carry him through.

The restaurant space no longer looked like anything to him. It had looked like a horror movie when he had first leased it, then a construction site, and then—briefly and maybe delusionally—like a real restaurant. But months of nearly living in the space had taken away any objectivity he’d ever had, and he kept getting that sinking ache in the floor of his stomach, the one that said he’d lost his eye for all this long ago, that his carefully vetted fixtures and colors were as modern as polka dots and mint-green tea cozies
. W
hen Britt had walked around it looking pleased and surprised, even impressed, Harry had felt, for the first time in months, the lifting of abject terror. Britt was many things—egotistical and easily annoyed, judgmental of clothes and architecture, more limited in his palate than he would ever admit—but Harry knew no one with taste as flawless. Even as a teenager Britt had known to mess up his hair instead of feather it, to wear scuffed old work boots instead of Converse.

It was still difficult to believe he now had Britt as a resource
. W
hen Harry had first returned to Linden, he’d wanted to wait until he had a definite space to unveil to his brothers
. W
hen he finally had, he’d been surprised how hands-off they were. He’d thought they would be more help. If nothing else, he’d figured they’d have plenty of criticisms for him—and in truth they had, but few had felt like issues he could address
. T
he first time he’d invited them over to see the raw space, he’d been expecting to hear about table configurations. Instead Leo had shrugged in the direction of the whole building, the whole block, the very river a quarter mile away. It was too painful for Harry—he hadn’t spoken to them for weeks after that visit. He just got up each morning and drove to the restaurant space, stopped at the coffee cart and waved at the homeless guys, put his head down and worked. He knew it was childish and maybe disastrous to avoid hearing any more from his brothers, but he was this far into it; his deepest fear was that it was too late to back out and too late to make the most needed changes.

And yet after a while he’d called them up to play basketball anyway, deciding not to say a word about the restaurant. He knew they expected him to broach it again and had a feeling they dreaded it, so Harry had done his best to have a good game and just enjoy his brothers’ company and the loose, easy feeling of a physical activity he excelled at, so different from the brute work of the restaurant build-out. Leo loosened up on the court, and Britt was surprisingly sanguine about losing a number of games. It had been a good morning, one that let Harry salve his hurt feelings over the restaurant.

Sometimes, when he hadn’t seen them for a time, Harry’s vision of his brothers grew warped. In his head, he might be so busy arguing some lost point from an old conversation, in this case about his restaurant, that he expected them to be cold and hostile when he finally saw them. But they never were; they were friendly, if not overtly affectionate, amused and amusing, apparently having forgotten whatever issue Harry was still perseverating about.

He often felt himself to be inside a little bubble of loneliness when he was around his brothers. At times Britt and Leo would turn toward him in unison, bemused and distant, an eyebrow quirked upward on each forehead. Those six and seven years hit in just the wrong place: closer in age and they might have felt more like friends, further and they might have felt more protective. Instead the three seemed to have grown up in two different households. His brothers’ offhand conversation reminded him of just how intertwined their daily lives were, lives in which he had little place. It wasn’t that he begrudged that intimacy but that he believed he had no claim to it, no more so than when they were in their late teens and he was ten. A part of Harry never stopped feeling like the little kid hopping around in the background, amazed when his brothers displayed any interest in him at all.

And sometimes their interest was worse than disinterest. These were the moments when Harry understood very clearly that he amused them. It had never occurred to him that all his work and travel over the years—the gathering, formless, but electric sensation he had had for so long that told him everything he did was connected and necessary, that he was amassing information, skills, viewpoints—to them looked like nothing, like fucking around.

Neither even asked why he’d come back, as if it were a given that one returned to one’s hometown after years away. Harry had begun to wonder if his older brothers, whom he’d always viewed as more sophisticated and worldly than he was, were in fact as provincial as any other citizens of a medium-sized town that clung to its roots in failed industry and immigration with equal parts defiance and exasperation. Or perhaps Britt and Leo felt that they had already done what Harry was trying to do, that they had helped kick-start a bit of a revival in their hometown’s fortunes and that anything Harry might add to it was just more of the same.